- Life And Society In Classical Greece
(By Oswyn Murray)Society
By the classical period of the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. there were hundreds of communities of Greeks living scattered around
the shores of the Mediterranean 'like frogs around a pond', as Plato put it. From the central sea of the Aegean, with its island
communities, and the coastal towns of Turkey and eastern and southern Greece, they had spread to north Greece, the Black Sea coast
and southern Russia, to Sicily and south Italy, and as far as Provence, Spain, and north Africa. These communities regarded
themselves as basically similar, as living in a polis, the only form of truly civilized life. Of course many aspects of their social and
economic life were different: some cities possessed large agricultural territories or serf populations, others were heavily engaged in
trade in raw materials such as corn, olive oil, dried fish, wine, metals, timber, slaves, or in manufactured goods, whether made on the
spot or imported from eastern and other cultures; there was also a huge outflow of Greek goods in certain areas, and of skilled labour
such as doctors, stonemasons, and professional mercenaries. The economy of the cities varied enormously, and so did their
functions: some were essentially fortresses, others based on a religious shrine; but most had ports, and all had some land and
constituted an administrative centre. In principle it should be possible to reconstruct the social and economic life of a typical Greek
city, much as Plato in the Laws and Aristotle in the last two books of the Politics believed it possible to discover an ideal city behind
the unsatisfactory multifariousness of real cities.
The reason that we cannot do this satisfactorily is not so much the absence of evidence as its concentration on two unrepresentative
examples. Only Athens offers a sufficient variety of material for us to be able to understand in detail the way people lived; and from
that evidence we see that Athens was fundamentally untypical, in being more varied, and yet more systematic in its interrelations, in
fact more advanced than most, if not all other, Greek cities. In contrast Sparta is described for us by Athenian writers as the opposite
of Athens, so that we see only those parts of it which are different from Athenian institutions. Order and obedience are contrasted
with anarchy and freedom, the agricultural economy with trade and manufacture, the freedom of women with Athenian restrictions.
Where there is no opposition the sources fall silent: our main writer, Xenophon, in his little book on Sparta, forgets to mention the
Spartan helot serfs, because slavery was universal; and we hear nothing of the massive armaments industry which must have
provided the standardized weapons of the Spartan military caste. Outside these two cities we have only scattered information or
chance finds, such as the great law-code of the small city of Gortyn in inland Crete.
So Athens must be the focus, in the knowledge that we are describing life in other cities only in so far as they resembled Athens, and
in the belief that at least the basic social and economic relationships of Greek cities are more similar to each other than to the tribal
and non-Greek areas which surrounded them. Yet even for a single society we must recognize that there is no one viewpoint: each
individual witness will describe his world differently. Plato's dialogues portray Athens in vivid detail, as a world of young and
godlike intellectuals meeting in private houses for conversation or social drinking, strolling in suburban parks or walking down to
the Piraeus for a festival, listening to famous visitors skilled in rhetoric or philosophy from all over Greece. Even when Socrates is in
prison under sentence of execution, the authorities allow large groups of his friends to visit him and discuss with him such questions
as whether he should escape, and the nature of life after death. Finally Socrates drinks the hemlock, and his limbs slowly lose
sensation as he converses peacefully and rationally.
Yet for most of the time which Plato describes, Athens was fighting a long and bloody war in which at least half the population died,
many of them from a particularly horrifying plague which scarred even those who survived it, and which was partly the consequence
of the unsanitary conditions in which vast numbers of citizens were camped, at first in the heat of the summer, and later all year, on
every available space of open or sacred land within the city walls. In reality travel was dangerous and very much restricted; and the
way down to the Piraeus must have been as filthy, as stinking, and as crowded as the slums of Calcutta. Nor were Athenian prison
conditions as humane or as clean as Plato suggests; and the medical effects of hemlock arc not mere numbness of the limbs-they
include choking, slurring of speech, convulsions, and uncontrollable vomiting.